Used price: $7.75
Buy one from zShops for: $9.99
List price: $14.95 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $8.29
Buy one from zShops for: $9.99
Used price: $18.67
Collectible price: $21.31
In this work, he gives you the need for the Castle, why it came into being, how it developed. He show the strict structure of the Castle society - inside and out, the lives of the people running it and those serving in it, even down to what they are and worse. He even cover medieval recreation!!
He breathes live into the subject, giving a fresh new look instead of tired impressions.
Excellent work for people wish to see Castle life as it was or for Writers of Historical works.
Highly recommended.
Used price: $21.90
Pathfinder Press is dedicated to, among other things, publishing the speeches and writings of revolutionary figures like Mother Jones. So, in this book, you won't read some professor's interpretation of her, you'll read her own words. And what words she spoke! Her speeches and letters spring from the page full of passion and courage.
She went to where the miners were fighting and dying and stood up to the cops and the goons who tried to intimidate her. She was braver and bolder than most (male) labor leaders of her time, and in every way a superior human being to those who claim to "lead" the labor unions today.
Mother Jones traveled incessantly, giving speeches and organizing coal miners and copper miners, textile workers, construction workers. She exposed and decried the abuses of the capitalist system. She stood up to the richest employers, their cops, courts, the National Guard, the U.S. Congress and presidents. She championed workers framed-up and victimized in the course of many struggles-- including insurgent fighter from Mexico during its 1910 revolution.
Her courage, honesty and perseverance should be a better-known example for workers, farmers and young people today. She has lots of short, snappy observations I find useful to raise at work, to help get others thinking a bit. And I found her letters, which reflect her striving to promote the most uncompromising, militant and class-conscious wing of unions and the Socialist Party, especially interesting.
Used price: $0.18
Collectible price: $0.50
Buy one from zShops for: $0.35
Warning: This reference book can be addictive once you discover its vocabulary-enchancing functionality and even its entertainment value.
Used price: $8.95
Scattered across the years, I have bought two or three sets of Riverworld. Just thinking about the series - far from my home base in MInnesota - makes me want to read it again. Unfortunately, the series is now out of print.
Make the effort to find a copy of this series in either a used book store or a library. It WILL be worth it.
Tim Niles
List price: $19.95 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $0.64
Collectible price: $2.21
Buy one from zShops for: $2.98
As a seismologist, I found the book often irritating (right down to its title: there is no evidence that the San Andreas has ever suffered a magnitude 8 earthquake or that it ever will), and sometimes too dramatic, but in the end it left me with a feeling of chagrin. Fradkin put together a good, coherent story of the San Andreas' hazards, but to do so, he had to fight his way through arcane jargon. His comment that the scientists don't know how to communicate makes me squirm, but it is absolutely right.
Not only is this a must-read for anyone within 200 miles of the San Andreas, it should be required for all seismologists and emergency managers who ever have to talk to the public.
Great book by an author who has put his heart and soul into internalizing the meaning of these mysterious earth processes.
This books gets the highest recommendation I could possibly give to anyone genuinely interested in understanding the genesis and growth of Mormon thought. Barlow writes about complex things in a manner that is easily consumed by the lay reader, without sacrificing scholarship. This is an excellent book.
Used price: $51.31
Buy one from zShops for: $51.31
Chapter one is an overview of differential equations and dynamical systems. All the concepts needed for a study of such systems are discussed in great detail and also very informally, stressing instead the understanding of the concepts, and not merely their definition. Some of the proofs of the main results, such as the Hartman-Grobman and the stable manifold theorems, are omitted however.
This is followed in Chapter 2 by a very intuitive discussion of the van der Pols equation, Duffings equation, the Lorenz equations, and the bouncing ball. Numerical calculations are effectively employed to illustrate some of the main properties of the systems modeled by these equations.
A taste of bifurcation theory follows in Chapter 3. Center manifolds are defined and many examples are given, but the proof of the center manifold theorem is omitted unfortunately. Normal forms and Hopf bifurcations are treated in detail.
Averaging methods are discussed in Chapter 4, with part of the averaging theorem proved using a version of Gronwall's lemma. Several interesting examples of averaging are given, along with a discussion of to what extent the bifurcation properties of the averaged equations carry over to the original equations. Most importantly, this chapter discusses the Melnikov function, so very important in the study of small perturbations of dynamical systems with a hyperbolic fixed point. A full proof that simple zeros of the Melnikov function imply the transversal intersection of the stable and unstable manifolds is given.
Chapter 5 moves on to results of a more purely mathematical nature, where symbolic dynamics and the Smale horseshoe map are discussed. The proofs of the stable manifold theorem and the Palis lambda lemma are, however, omitted. Markov partitions and the shadowing lemma are discussed also but the latter is not proven. The authors do however give a proof of the Smale-Birkhoff homoclinic theorem. A purely mathematical overview of attractors is given along with measure-theoretic (ergodic) properties of dynamical systems.
The (local) bifurcation theory of Chapter 3 is extended to global bifurcations in the next chapter. A very detailed discussion of rotation numbers is given but the KAM theory is only briefly mentioned. The main emphasis is on 1-dimensional maps, the Lorentz system, and Silnikov theory. The authors give a very detailed treatment of wild hyperbolic sets.
The book ends with a discussion of bifurcations from equilibrium points that have multiple degeneracies. The discussion is more motivated from a physical standpont than the last few chapters. But some interesting mathematical constructions are employed, namely the role of k-jets, which have fascinating connections with algebraic goemetry, via the "blowing-up" techniques.
The concepts in the book have proven to have enduring value in the study of dynamical systems, and this book will no doubt continue to serve students and researchers in the years to come.
I obtained Guckenheimer and Holmes' classic when it first came out in 1983. It was so clear, concise and intellectually engaging that it inspired me to wonder whether the system of equations I was studying for my Ph.D. research at the time--the governing equations of thermal convection at infinite Prandtl number (which govern plate tectonics in the earth's mantle)--might have a chaotic solution. Guckenheimer and Holmes outlined a clear methodology to find out the answer.
My advisor at the University of Chicago thought not. Only steady solutions could be admitted in the absence of external forcing due to the lack of momentum transfer--this belief was widely held at the time, despite certain oscillatory solutions found by Fritz Busse (then at UCLA) and chaotic solutions found in certain limiting cases by Andrew Fowler at Oxford.
In despair, I left my studies at Chicago to work as a Unix sysadmin at my undergraduate alma mater --Cornell, where (unbeknownst to me when I took the job) John Guckenheimer had just relocated from UCSC. Delighted to find him there, I sat in on his courses. Later, with his help, I wrote a proposal to NASA to support the completion of my thesis--with him and Donald Turcotte serving as my advisors.
The 3-year fellowship was approved, and during this time I demonstrated and published that thermal convection at infinite Prandtl number--a condition that pervades many planetary interiors including our own--is indeed chaotic in the absence of external forcing.
Prior to this, planetary convection codes primarily looked for steady state solutions. Since, numerical analysts in the field have upgraded to time-dependent models. The source of chaos at infinite Prandtle number I identified--the heat advection term--is now widely accepted as the source of what is now called "Thermal Turbulence" in planetary interiors.
The defense at Chicago was quite an event. Since my new advisors were flown in from Ithaca, you might say my thesis--The Nonlinear Dynamics of Thermal Convection at Infinite Prandtl Number--passed with flying colors. Someone at Chicago might disagree, but his opinion is irrelevant.
Demonstrating the many possible solutions to a single set of equations and showing how the choice of solution depends very sensitively on the rather poorly-constrained initial conditions of the earth--does render mantle modeling itself rather superfluous and indeed, scientifically suspect. However, many important professors who stayed in the field nonetheless continue to run their time-dependent mantle convection codes, and never cease to wonder at the fact that they all get different results. It's rather amusing, really.
When all that too has passed away, the truths so beautifully put forth in Guckenheimer and Holmes will remain. Like I said, it's a classic. Furthermore, being number 42 in its series, it's got to be the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Was for me, anyway.